


every mouth sings of what it's without

by sharkfights (feartown)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, I hope not, here to rip delphine apart and sew her back together dot com, i mean not really but like if you haven't seen it then you won't understand, spoilers for the series to date, will i ever write a fic with a rating different than m
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 12:26:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2191812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feartown/pseuds/sharkfights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she met Cosima – that is, the day 324b21 became <i>Cos-i-ma</i> and not <i>the subject</i> – there was a split, and time became two halves: the time before Cosima, and with her. </p><p>Now, Delphine thinks, it has split again, two diced into three.</p><p>Before Cosima. With Cosima.</p><p><i>After</i> Cosima.</p><p>(set post-s2.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	every mouth sings of what it's without

**Author's Note:**

> it seems today i was in the mood to write something horrendously sad, which always seems to happen when i'm in the middle of writing comedy, bizarrely enough - i guess there's gotta be an outlet somewhere??? but wow i'm real sorry it's this. i swear, i just went to get some nutella, i wasn't looking for more fanfiction to waste time with.
> 
>  
> 
> title from iron & wine's "innocent bones".

* * *

 

Delphine sits in the dark and wishes she hadn’t run.

There’s a noise sitting in the shell of her ear. It sounds like the thrum of tensioned wire after it’s been touched, that subterranean quiver not unlike the distant rumble of the sea. It sits there singing to her against the window of a dusty motel room in Luxembourg, pushing away the yawn of sleep and suggesting instead that she light the last cigarette waiting on the sill next to her.

The lighter _thwicks_ , warmth flourishing for a moment and issuing her fingers with orange hues. Smoke fills her throat.

When she closes her eyes she can see the outline of Cosima’s mouth the way it looked the last time she kissed her. Open, wanting, like Delphine’s body was the alms it had been seeking.

She dreams of it. In the dream her mouth is red; it spits out earth and wood splinters and shards of rock, spluttering with that hollow cough. Echoes of blood. A hand pulls away and drips with it, skeletal and bleached like old bones. A shadow empties its pockets and they are filled with a desert’s worth of dust. Cosima is in the ground, and all she does is scream.

 _Nightmare_ is probably a more apt description, Delphine supposes, because when she inevitably wakes it is in the cold sweat of fear, shirt sticking under her arms and to the small of her back. It’s been a week, and she still can’t sleep through the night.

Stubbing out the cigarette, she hugs her knees and thinks about what they don’t tell the runaways – your nails get long, they dig into your skin and catch on errant threads; they bend and rip and they bleed in the corners, and your hair begins to slicken; the oil spreads and turns the curl limp and frayed.

When Delphine was nine her hair was long and fell in ringlets, and now she thinks of cutting it off and dyeing it brown, dyeing it the shade of rabbit fur and sand wet with water; the colour of ordinary and forgetting.

Her breasts press hard into the swell of her thighs, like she might crush her own heart between slices of rib and spine if she tries hard enough. She wonders if she should change her name again, send her accent farther south – build herself a new skin to get back home. She wonders if there’s a point in even doing anything, given that DYAD’s arm reaches to the very rim of the world, given that they are waiting for her with bared teeth and yellowed eyes wherever she might try to tread.

But she wonders, primarily, that even if she did get back home: would she find Cosima, or her corpse?

 

 

 

 

 

When she met Cosima – that is, the day 324b21 became _Cos-i-ma_ and not _the subject_ – there was a split, and time became two halves: the time before Cosima, and with her.

Now, Delphine thinks, it has split again, two diced into three.

Before Cosima. With Cosima.

 _After_ Cosima.

 

 

 

 

 

( _Before (preposition)_ : previous to, earlier or sooner than)—

 

France is stifling and she learned years ago that Paris is filled less with the love of people than it is with the love of sewers and trains, a parody of the city she grew up breathing in.

In a high-ceilinged room Aldous Leekie has a smile full of teeth that are too big for his mouth, and he lectures like he is a god among petty mortal souls.

Delphine sits at the front and knows he’s watching her, feeling the pull of her as she drinks in his knowledge and tastes the word _Neolution_ on her tongue. She is naïve and confident (finally, after years of long limbs and eyes sitting huge in their sockets), heady with the promise of a doctorate around the corner, and lucky for him Aldous has forged a career around sniffing out her type.

He invites her to dinner, and then his bed. And eventually, to America.

She signs a contract that says _I will not fall in love with the subject_ , and voids it the moment she shakes Cosima’s hand.

 

 

 

 

 

( _With (preposition)_ : accompanied by; accompanying)—

 

They take a trip they first time they realize Cosima is really getting sick. Sarah is still running holes into the bottoms of her shoes with Kira and Cal, out in the smoke of the wild, and Delphine thinks the air might do Cosima good.

The cottage they rent is incongruent with the landscape that stretches in rugged surges around them – too modern, too clean-lined and sparse, but it looks out to the mountains and Cosima seems happier. She sits on the back step and Delphine lets her roll a joint – just one – and wrinkles her nose at the greenness of its perfume.

 

 

At night she watches the fake flames lick at the mouth of the fake chimney, and feels a fake warmth prickle at her skin. Fire is strange without the smell of timber, without the spit and crackle as it blackens – something about it is unnatural.

Delphine taps the ridge of collarbone under her fingers, and Cosima’s head shifts in her lap. "What do you think of after a match goes out? The smell; what does it make you think of?"

"Birthday candles," Cosima says - immediately, proudly. Fondly.

Delphine smiles. "I do not think I've ever met a person who does not say that."

A crease forms in the space between Cosima's eyes, not sure of the emotion she can feel in Delphine's voice. Delphine looks at her hands, counts the stains of red on her nails - one, two, three - and ignores the cuticles that she's worried to angry shreds.

"Why, what do you think of?" Cosima asks, and it's so innocent that Delphine almost laughs.

"I think of death."

 

 

They take a walk along the road on a Sunday, and from a church they can hear a pastor speak about God, his voice carrying through an open window. They stop – Delphine has never had the inclination for religion, as much as her mother would have liked her to, but sermons have always filled her with an abstract sense of wonder, and she likes the soaring sound of hymns.

Cosima doesn’t appear to listen. She calls to a horse over the fence, smooths a hand down its nose and braids the snag of hair between its ears. “It suits you,” she tells it, and turns to Delphine with a great white grin. “Do you ever think about what it would be like if we were built like horses? That kinda power would be so rad.” She grabs Delphine’s hips and clucks, laughing, and the horse flicks a half-interested ear at the sound.

Delphine just thinks _yes_ , _if only,_ and imagines the outline of a billowing lung in the horse’s chest.

 

 

There are late flowers and an early winter. They stay another week and Delphine wishes the ache in her chest would go away.

 

 

It turns out that even sick Cosima sleeps in twists like a sun-drunk cat, limbs slung across the bed and across Delphine’s chest, supine and heavy.

“Cherie—Cosima, _please_ ,” Delphine murmurs, drawing Cosima’s hand away from her sternum where it fell gracelessly moments earlier, jolting Delphine awake for a third time.

Cosima stirs and mumbles something in reply, fingers tightening around Delphine’s.

“This bed is only big enough for two if both stay the size of normal human beings, Cosima,” she says, properly awake now, “Merde, sometimes I feel like I am sleeping with a lemur.”

There’s no response from Cosima, but Delphine knows she’s not asleep, so she bends forward and sends her lips skidding down the dip of Cosima’s waist, waiting for the soft tumble of a sigh and smiling when she hears it.

She kisses until Cosima is spread across the sheets and tilting her hips into her mouth, slick and needy, and her hands are coarse through Delphine’s hair. Everything feels imminent, and the air is thick, breaking over her back like surf. She curls her fingers and Cosima moans, straining, pitched, and under the other hand the meat of her thigh contracts with every thrust.

There’s a rushing; blood chants in her ears and she feels bone, feels it press and grind – under her fingers, under her mouth, under the skin of her hips rolling against the mattress – and she roughs her tongue hard against Cosima’s clit until her legs bow wide and her back coils like a bent spring, all blooming noise from deep in her throat and filling her chest tight with emotion.

Cosima, creature of heart-lights, of sun and sweat and the peaty sweetness of decay, says her name and it sounds like benediction, the word eaten up by a gasping breath over and over until she finally catches it. Delphine, Delphine.

 _Delphine_.

 

 

When they get back to the city Delphine remembers why they left, with Leekie keeping secrets and Rachel Duncan’s icy claws dug neatly into her shoulders – the only thing she can take comfort in is the white of her knuckles around the edge of a lab counter, the shake of her thighs as Cosima’s head dips between them, the sound of her own voice pluming out of her mouth when she comes.

 

 

And soon there is not even that. Soon there is blood, there is red on their sheets and mottling their clothes, so instead she takes comfort in the science: the promise of stem cells and a little more time.

 

 

Cosima’s body seizes under her hands and she wants to murder Ethan Duncan for what he has done, for the disease he has inflicted on these women who don’t deserve to suffer more than they already have. She wants to murder him for making her think about burials, about having to think of flowers Cosima likes and whether she would want a service in a church. A sermon leaks through her memory, the words of a hymn – _be thou the constant guardian of every possession and every life—_

When she wakes, Cosima is different, hued duller and quieter. She smiles with cracks, and Delphine can almost hear creaking when she bends. The cannula sits under her nose and mocks with long grey fingers that snake over Cosima’s ears, travelling down to the oxygen tank she lugs around like a child.

But she tries to have hope; tries in the face of Leekie’s death, of Sarah’s distrust – until Rachel stands next to her in an elevator and tells her she will no longer be working with clones. Her stomach drops down between her feet.

— _For our corrupt desires are dead at the mere sight of thee._

 

 

 

 

 

( _After (preposition)_ : in succession to; at the close of)—

 

On the deck of a ship Delphine holds up a match. She lights it with the box, blows it out, thinks of Cosima. The smell of death mingles with the smell of the sea, and she feels it roll under her feet. She hopes (prays).

Her fingers are brittle with salt. She is going home.

 

 


End file.
